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Stay away from Windows One Care


Darkling
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I decided to give Windows One Care, Anti-Virus and Anti-Spyware a try to see if it can compete with Panda, McAfee and Norton, so I ran a full sweep on one of my computers, uninstalled Panda and installed One care on one of my computers. At first everything seemed fine, ran the "tune up wizard" where it went through all the paces and seemed to keep the computer up to date. About a month later, I tried playing UC Gold on that computer (only a 2Ghz, UCAWA not too smooth on it) and man it was SUPER SLOOOOOWWW. Looked at the processes running and recognized some spyware, so I ran the One Care Tune up Wizard again and after a couple of hrs, It reported back that everything was OK and the computer was fully protected, and yet ALL the Spyware processes were still there!

I went ahead and uninstalled it and tried to install Panda, but it left a mess in the Registry and Panda thought it was still installed, so Panda would not install. Thought OK, let me Reinstall One Care then Uninstall again, hopefully this time it will do a better job of cleaning itself up... No luck. (in the meantime I'm dealing with a Popup every 5 seconds from all the Spyware and Popup Generators that One Care left behind... Everything LOOKED ok, because it was blocking this stuff, but it didn't prevent the actuall processes from being installed.) Finally, installed McAfee Security Suite, and it cleaned up the vast majority of it. Panda would have done a better job, but oh well.

Moral of the story. If you don't want your computers to get HEAVILY infected with Viruses, Trojans, Popup Generators and Spyware.... DO NOT USE ONE CARE!!!

Total Spyware removed by McAfee... 52

Total Trojans removed by McAfee... 38

Total Viruses removed by McAfee... 12

All from a computer that just hours ago was "Protected" by One Care!

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Download and run BOTH Spybot Search & Destroy and Lavasoft Ad-Aware SE Personal to get rid of the spyware.

I used to use Norton Systemworks until I got fedup with the bloat, incompatiblities etc. I then switched to using Kaspersky Internet Security 6 and its all good.

Norton was a b*tch to remove. Even the uninstaller and all the clean tools left stuff of it behind. I had to do some serious forensics to rid myself of that particular crapware - which, up until two months ago, I had been using for many years.

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Norton requires you to hit Safe Mode and delete ghost drivers, etc. just to uninstall it. I never bothered using it after the first 30 day trial where it did that.

I use AVG Antivirus which is free and auto-updates itself.

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Tried Lavasoft, but it got stuck on one "RootKit" and couldn't remove it. The Rootkit would then reinfect the machine over and over again. I would REALLY like to Reinstall Panda, it's the only product I've ever used that gets EVERYTHING out, but I can't figure out what registry settings One Care left behind that won't allow Panda to install again. I'll give Spybot a shot. How is AVG against Spyware and Trojans?

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I run Hitman pro every so often (English text is at the bottom of the page), it sequentially downloads and runs a series of antivirus and anti spyware programs, takes a while but catches a lot.

I'm downloading AVG now, thanks for the tip, $ilk.

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Ditto on AVG, I have used it on my home PC's and installed it for some clients and it works well.

Last time I downloaded it, I noticed a program on their site called 'Ewido', it is an antispyware/adware program, I tried it out on a couple PC's now and it seems to work pretty well.

http://free.grisoft.com

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Yeah I just installed Ewido in Safe Mode with network support, since on that computer, I can't get on the internet anymore in regular mode and it found a TON of stuff that none of the other spyware programs have found, but I have to wait until I switch it to normal mode to see if it's going to clean it. If this doesn't work, I'm just going to have to re-install, which means resetting all my keys again.. that really sucks. This was the first time that I ran one of my computers without Panda in 3 years, and the Virus / Spyware programs have gotten WAY more sophisticated than they used to be.

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Combination of Ewido and AVG and McAfee Firewall finally knocked out the Look-to-me components that kept hijacking the system, basically there were 2 modules, if I would run Ewido, it would knock out one of them, but the other module would re-install that one. If I ran AVG, the second module would be knocked out, but the first would reinstall the second one. Running both, with the firewall in Lockdown mode, to keep either module from downloading it's sister program, kept them locked down long enough to remove both. Finally able to put Panda back on, I just like it better because it has the Firewall, AV & Anti-spyware all in one program.

Whew!!!!!!!!!!!

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Try using "Drop My Rights" with your browser. That fools any malware into thinking you are a limited user ( when you log on as a administrator) and makes it harder to do serious damage. Just google "Drop My Rights" to find the executable.

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